Weekly Wyrm ~ October 29, 2013

MMORPG reported on the Neverwinter ranger class today. Cryptic is fulfilling their promise to make it a free class. It should be here before the end of the year.

The ranged/melee looks like a fun class like the LotRO hunter, except faster-paced and more killing focus with less crowd control. You only have a handful of skills on your Neverwinter bar, so where are you going to put multiple trap skills, daze, and mez, anyway.

I’m back playing Rift, and I’ve gained a couple levels since the weekend. I’m having fun. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer and colder. It’s the time of year to hunker down and pour lots of hours into your favorite games. It’s going so well that I’ve become more ambitious.

I keep wanting to play one of my alts in Rift, but I already have Mage souls that I want to learn or improve. A better plan would be to keep two characters at cap long-term in two different MMOs. Which ones?

LotRO still nags in the back of my head. A little imp from Baator is whispering horrible twisted excuses to pull the MMO ragequit-crawlback maneuver:

“I’ve already paid for Helm’s Deep with the point package I bought for like $60 last fall. So why not?” …. “I could abandon my main and just play an alt for the story.” …. “I could just play casual solo, hit cap, and quit. I’m surely kicked from my guild due to inactivity anyway.” …. “I could update my Elven Adventuress interface for myself and not release it publicly.” ….

Etc. And then what happens when I feel a rant coming on. All of the I’m all blah blah about LotRO here on my blog. Or worse yet mouthing off on the LotRO forums. No one wants to listen to Silverangel hurl curses in wicked witch form.

Right now, LotRO is the only MMO in which I have characters at cap (3). My alternatives? A WoW panda mage. Start all over, since I have little interest in continuing my 80 DK, Priest, or Hunter. I have a feeling that effort won’t last.

Or should I wait for Elder Scrolls, which ticked my interest up by being a subscription model. I could try Guild Wars 2 again. GW2 is a fine game. I played it a lot, enjoyed it, and stopped when I got bored.

The problem with Neverwinter is the cash shop. Based on my beta experience and everything I’ve read, the NW cash shop is worse than LotRO. So now does LotRO get a cookie because other developers are building even more intrusive cash shops, so I have to go back to the devil that I know?

I’m overthinking this equation. The urge to have fun solves itself. Until then, I’ll be having fun playing Rift, which has another sudden uptick of players due to going F2P on Steam. Views of my Newbie Guide have doubled to over 300 each day for the last four days.

4 responses to “Weekly Wyrm ~ October 29, 2013”

“Buybot has acquired a heavy inferno nightmare” (google filled that in for me far too early). I think it is safe to expect LOTRO to avoid this for awhile.

Cash shops are here to stay. As long as the marketeers understand that different players are willing to spend different amounts of money, they will sell the same game at different price points with different amounts of features artificially added or removed. Worry about the game plus intrusiveness, not the cash shop (and doesn’t Rift feature a cash shop? Haven’t downloaded that one).

DDO has had rangers since launch (druids, on the other hand, took about 6 years to get around to). They steadily nerfed them from roughly when I made one my main (about 2009) to when I left (2011?). They should be still fun to play, but don’t expect to play at the top levels (epic elite) with the cool kids.

Hi, Mr. commenter formerly known as wumpus. Looking at a video, the NWN ranger looks a lot like a GW2 rogue, actually. Rift does have a cash shop. What it doesn’t have is buttons and ads everywhere in-game and on the interface to get you to click and open the store. That’s the big difference. It also doesn’t have almost obligatory buys, like giving everyone a model-clay grey hideous horse, and then charging everyone $5 PER COLOR SET to color it. The main annoyance with NWN is the popups right in the middle of your screen that say “DRIZZTTTT opened a platinum chest and won an epic cosmos pony!”.

You should download Rift! Imagine the four core D&D classes: wizard, thief, fighter, and cleric, picking one to play, and then having all variant classes playable by your character by switching out “souls” when you want. If you roll a rogue, you’ve also got an assassin, a ranger, an archer, a shadow tanking class,soon a combat medic, a bard, etc. I’m not exaggerating. It’s awesome, and much better than making alts and more alts.

You can also multi-class all of those. Which is probably more fun than snorgling and ent, unless you’re a wood elf or a botanist. Agree allowing people to spend how much they can afford is here to stay, unfortunately.